Nokia N79

Glancing at Nokia’s N79 on the interweb, we really didn’t think the two of us would get on. We had flash backs to the weird rice grain-like keys we found so hard to digest on the N82.

Thankfully, the handset is much better looking and nicer to use in person.

As Nokia’s self-proclaimed smallest, slimmest N-series handset, the N79 gets away with being quite svelte and lightweight at just 97g – without feeling too cheap or plastic.

Colour me bad

The front takes its cue from the world of Apple’s iPod with a shiny white coating (and accompanying white headphones), although we’re not so enamoured with the interchangeable back casing cover hues.

Going back to the front of the N79’s aesthetics, the 2.4in screen is ample if not a little smudge prone, with a nice Nokia emblazoned ‘tab’ on the top right, which is mirrored (with the branding replaced by a button) towards the bottom left.

The keypad is made up of four lines of plastic, each housing three keys, which proves sturdy yet responsive. While four rice grains serve as the menu navigation, complemented by a Clear button and Nokia menu shortcut, as well as the usual suspects in terms of Call and End Call buttons.

More than just good looks

The UI is both visually appealing and easy to use thanks to the familiarity of the Symbian OS. The N79’s built-in accelerometer is pretty responsive and makes using things like the camera much, much easier.

Talking of the camera, with a far-from-skimpy 5MP at your disposal, plus Carl Zeiss optics, a Tessar lens, dual LED flash, and other features including 20x digital zoom, white balance, red eye reduction and different capture, scene, colour tone and light sensitivity modes, pictures turn out well. Geotagging is also on the menu as is the ability to upload your snaps using HSDPA or Wi-Fi.

The phone has 50MB on board as standard, which can be beefed up to 8GB through the use of microSD – enabling you to house thousands of tracks and pictures and hours of video if you so wish.

The microSD slot is neatly housed just above the USB port. While this looks nice, we had a few issues trying to remove the card without a lot of jiggling.

While the N79 is nice to look at and to use, the same could be said of many phones out there on the market already.